No, I'm implying that your "Real World" is mainly populated with simple minded beings who are unable to think beyond "I'll just do what everybody else does and I'll be fine". You know, the people that you see on the streets these days running around in a patriotic frenzy, waving American flags marked "Made in China". THAT's your "Real World". And I'll be damned if I will allow myself to be reduced to that, just so I can play some stupid computer game.
I'm an open source geek, and I do pay for software; in fact, just last week I bought a copy of Redhat Linux 7.2. I pay for games too, and I don't even care if they're closed source -- WTF, they're just games. But for the same reason, I'm completely uninterested in Linux games. My PS2 is more than enough to satisfy my gaming needs, and it does a better job at it than Linux will ever do.
From the original article: Real People in the Real World don't care about religious issues like if it's running under Wine or if it's a native port.
Linux users don't care about religious issues? No shit. If I didn't care about religious issues, I would be running Windows XP now, not Linux. Dumbass...
I've even checked out this IE thing they're talking about, it made me curious. It seems to be a web browser of some sort. I'd love to try it, too bad they don't make it for my platform.. Oh well. I'm sure if it's anything worth reading on msn.com someone will post a mirror on/.:)
Heh. I like chicks who dig Linux. That's why I married a physicist.:)
About the "hope" that you speak about, well, yes and no. Yes, Linux on the desktop will never "lose" as such 'cause there's nothing to lose. We write desktop software for Linux because *we* need it. If I want a native KDE Gnutella client and there isn't one available, I code myself one. That's how Linux software gets built. And that's why stupid "what ifs" like the one in the article (What if the Linux community put an end to all the desktop nonsense right now and built on its strengths in global enterprise computing) are pure nonsense. If I want a gnutella client, I will damn well code a gnutella client, not frickin' enterprise software for which I have no use. And no, Linux will never outdo Microsoft on the desktop market, pretty much for the same reason. When I design a program, I design it to fit MY needs. If others find it useful, that's OK with me. But frankly, I couldn't care less about Joe AOL and what he expects from a software package, therefore my software will never work for him.
So I guess if for some strange reason you want all the world to run Linux, you'd better write commercial software for it. Not necessarily proprietary, but commercial. When the world finds a way to really make open source commercially successful, that's when Microsoft should start worrying.
It will hopefully make Linux users a little less complacent (and smug) than before.
In your dreams. As a Linux user, I'm smugger than ever. How can that be? Well, let's see: a huge bug is found in Linux kernel. Did anyone write an exploit that pur millions of Linux computers in jeopardy? No. Did a malicious worm get released and wreaked havoc on the Internet? Um, no. Did this bug cause ANY inconvenience AT ALL thus far? Um, no. And it never will. Why? Because 1) a patch was made instantly available, and 2) generally, Linux people have enough common sense to stay up to date with kernel patches. Sho why the hell shouldn't I be smug?
Hell yes. Can you believe the nerve of those people? Sharing FILES? Where the hell do they think they are, going around sharing stuff like that. People need to learn, once and for all, that sharing is bad. If they really want to be good, ethical citizens, they must stop this sharing nonsense at once and start being mean and selfish. That's how you build a strong, tightly-woven society, not by sharing - everybody knows that. Sheesh, where did those people go to school anyway?
Well, no. Not really. Even after a lot of job changes I still don't want job security. It's not for me. I'd rather have my independence thankyouverymuch. Right now I'm able to walk out the door without any notice whenever I find something I don't like at a job, and I think it's only fair for the employer to have the right to fire me without any notice whenever they feel like it. I like it that way. Don't have any family to support, never will. Why the hell would I want job security?
Um, what's that got to do with Linux? They are not saying "ditch Windows", they are saying "ditch IIS". IIS != Windows. There are other web servers out there that run perfectly well under Windows.
That's probably true for the US, and probably the rest of the Western countries. But most of the rest of the world relies only on cash, so you will still need cash if you want to travel to Eastern Europe or some of the other places where stores don't accept credit cards.
Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything This has been the case since 1933. The notes have no value for themselves, but for what they will buy. In another sense, because they are legal tender, Federal Reserve notes are "backed" by all the goods and services in the economy.
AFAIK, the gold backing thing was mandated by the gold exchange standard of 1920's, which has been replaced in 1971 by the Smithsonian Agreement which established fixed exchange currencies and was itself replaced in 1973 with the so-called
"fluctuating fiat currencies", i.e. exchange rates are set by the market according to supply/demand laws. So now currencies, including the US dollar, aren't really backed by anything except the strength of the economy of the country where they are issued. See this link for a documented study of the whole thing.
the geeks of the world need to, just for a moment, crawl out of their holes and write to the folks in congress
<LMAO> What if my country does not have a congress? You did say "geeks of the world". Or did you mean that I should write to someone in the American congress, even if I'm not an American? Now *that* would have some potential...:-)
Look, I wasn't trying to diss Debian. I run it myself on my laptop, and I quite enjoy the simplicity of apt. On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoy tinkering with the innards of my system and occasionally breaking stuff (that's how I learn best), and for that purpose rpm seems to me more powerful and versatile, but hey - to each his own.
That, and the fact that the average Apache admin is *way* more knowledgeable than your average IIS admin. I guess that's what you get when you market web servers under the "easy-to-use" paradigm: admins who know little else than where the "on/off" button is.
Even if they *did* work, what's the purpose? To keep tabs terrorists? Bwahaha. Bin Laden is already one step ahead in the high-tech race. He <gasp!>
turned off his cellphone, ditched the e-mail account and he's now communicating through human messengers!.
Crypto backdoors... Carnivore... Echelon... what a load of absolute crap.
If you had lived in my country back then, it was not the microphones you would have had to fear. It didn't take the government too long to figure out that microphones were quite inefficient as a surveillance tool - it wasn't very practical to monitor 23 million people with microphones. They were instead relying on the people themselves to snitch on each other. And it worked flawlessly. We actually didn't have any surveillance equipment installed in our homes. However, we were perfectly aware of the fact that nobody could trust anybody. The conditioning was so perfect that I couldn't even trust my own mother back then.
Believe me, surveillance technology is a joke compared to what people can do to themselves...
OK, here's how it is, or rather, was: the police had every power imaginable, they could do pretty much anything to anybody without needing so much as a warrant. BUT they didn't abuse the power, because they were in turn terrified by the Political Police/Secret Service (think KGB). They did not engage in bribery/thievery because the money would have been useless to them. Everyone's income was set and strictly checked by the government and one could have ended up in jail for as much as $1 if one couldn't show proof of income for it. There was no way to launder money either, since banks, stores and everything else was state-owned.
As for the possibility of abuse, here's the trick: only theoretically the police could do anything to anyone, practically they only did what they were *told* to do by their superiors, who were in turn under direct orders from Party officials. And those guys enforced a very strict zero-tolerance policy. You probably wonder at this point why the guys at the very top didn't tolerate or encourage abuse on the part of the police. Simple: there was no need for it. The totalitarian regime was in its 4th decade of existence, and by that time pretty much everybody had already been brainwashed into total obedience, and those who resisted the brainwashing were long since "dissappeared".
To sum it up, everybody knew that as long as they didn't do what they were not supposed to do, they didn't have any problems with the police. They *did* fear the power of the police, however - the sheer fear of what the police could do to them kept everyone in line. At the same time, we knew we were completely safe from criminals, thiefs, serial killers, burglars etc., because there weren't any: the police took care of that as well. I hope that explains the safety/fear paradox you pointed out. Orwell illustrated it best in "1984", Communist regimes were full of such paradoxes.
As someone who has lived for 18 years in a totalitarian state, I have to disagree. It *was* the safest place on earth. Yes, you had to refrain from criticizing the government if you wanted to stay out of trouble, but you were physically safe in any other respect. Everybody was so terrified by the all-powerful police that crime was almost non-existent. Now I'm not saying it was the nicest place to live, but it *was* safe.
As a non-USian, I don't envy you guys. You'll probably end up giving up a lot of your rights (because that's what the scared-out-of-its-mind majority wants) for nothing. Contrary to popular belief, the Internet, and technology in general, are not somehow confined inside the borders of the US. Encrypted communication and all the other technological goodies will continue to exist outside of US no matter how much you legislate against them. Your laws will have no effect on what terrorists can or cannot do, they will only erode YOUR privacy. Welcome to the road to a nice and safe police state.
*sigh* you illustrate my point about emotional language perfectly. You see, what for you is "complete destruction of Israel" for Arabs is "regaining our homeland"; what you think is "preventing Iraq from using Kuwait's oil fields to gather the $$$ to build a nuclear capability" they see as "greedy Americans invading our country so that they can have cheap gas for their huge disgusting SUVs" and so on. This only leads to pointless hatred. THIS is how you ended up hating them for bringing death and destruction to your homeland, and this is how they ended up hating you for pretty much the same reason.
The way you want it, the US should probably just erase everyone in the Middle East who "hates the American way of life" from the face of the Earth (along with whoever gets in the way, innocent or not) and be done with it. That would all be fine and dandy, except for the devastating effect it would have on the US society itself. You've already witnessed the racial hatred ignited by the WTC disaster, with Arab-Americans being the targets of violence simply because they look Arabic. If you think people will accept the idea that "Arabs living in the Middle East are bad, but Arab-Americans are good" you're dead wrong. Declaring all-out war on Arabs, or even "some" Arabs is going to unleash a wave of racism in America like you've never seen before. Violence begets violence, people always seem to forget that...
I guess what my whole rant is about is that before being Arabs, Americans, Indians etc. we're all people. And the Arab civilians who have been killed by American bullets and bombs are no less innocent than the Americans who lost their lives in the WTC terrorist attack. If you ignore that, you'll become the victim of your own violence.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm implying that your "Real World" is mainly populated with simple minded beings who are unable to think beyond "I'll just do what everybody else does and I'll be fine". You know, the people that you see on the streets these days running around in a patriotic frenzy, waving American flags marked "Made in China". THAT's your "Real World". And I'll be damned if I will allow myself to be reduced to that, just so I can play some stupid computer game.
I'm an open source geek, and I do pay for software; in fact, just last week I bought a copy of Redhat Linux 7.2. I pay for games too, and I don't even care if they're closed source -- WTF, they're just games. But for the same reason, I'm completely uninterested in Linux games. My PS2 is more than enough to satisfy my gaming needs, and it does a better job at it than Linux will ever do.
From the original article: Real People in the Real World don't care about religious issues like if it's running under Wine or if it's a native port.
Linux users don't care about religious issues? No shit. If I didn't care about religious issues, I would be running Windows XP now, not Linux. Dumbass...
I've even checked out this IE thing they're talking about, it made me curious. It seems to be a web browser of some sort. I'd love to try it, too bad they don't make it for my platform.. Oh well. I'm sure if it's anything worth reading on msn.com someone will post a mirror on /. :)
Heh. I like chicks who dig Linux. That's why I married a physicist. :)
About the "hope" that you speak about, well, yes and no. Yes, Linux on the desktop will never "lose" as such 'cause there's nothing to lose. We write desktop software for Linux because *we* need it. If I want a native KDE Gnutella client and there isn't one available, I code myself one. That's how Linux software gets built. And that's why stupid "what ifs" like the one in the article (What if the Linux community put an end to all the desktop nonsense right now and built on its strengths in global enterprise computing) are pure nonsense. If I want a gnutella client, I will damn well code a gnutella client, not frickin' enterprise software for which I have no use. And no, Linux will never outdo Microsoft on the desktop market, pretty much for the same reason. When I design a program, I design it to fit MY needs. If others find it useful, that's OK with me. But frankly, I couldn't care less about Joe AOL and what he expects from a software package, therefore my software will never work for him.
So I guess if for some strange reason you want all the world to run Linux, you'd better write commercial software for it. Not necessarily proprietary, but commercial. When the world finds a way to really make open source commercially successful, that's when Microsoft should start worrying.
It will hopefully make Linux users a little less complacent (and smug) than before.
In your dreams. As a Linux user, I'm smugger than ever. How can that be? Well, let's see: a huge bug is found in Linux kernel. Did anyone write an exploit that pur millions of Linux computers in jeopardy? No. Did a malicious worm get released and wreaked havoc on the Internet? Um, no. Did this bug cause ANY inconvenience AT ALL thus far? Um, no. And it never will. Why? Because 1) a patch was made instantly available, and 2) generally, Linux people have enough common sense to stay up to date with kernel patches. Sho why the hell shouldn't I be smug?
[...] this filesharing is destructive [...]
Hell yes. Can you believe the nerve of those people? Sharing FILES? Where the hell do they think they are, going around sharing stuff like that. People need to learn, once and for all, that sharing is bad. If they really want to be good, ethical citizens, they must stop this sharing nonsense at once and start being mean and selfish. That's how you build a strong, tightly-woven society, not by sharing - everybody knows that. Sheesh, where did those people go to school anyway?
I expect them to change the standard to accomodate the new "copy protection" features.
Yeah, tell that to Dmitry Sklyarov.
...and the other half are not Americans. :-)
Well, no. Not really. Even after a lot of job changes I still don't want job security. It's not for me. I'd rather have my independence thankyouverymuch. Right now I'm able to walk out the door without any notice whenever I find something I don't like at a job, and I think it's only fair for the employer to have the right to fire me without any notice whenever they feel like it. I like it that way. Don't have any family to support, never will. Why the hell would I want job security?
Um, what's that got to do with Linux? They are not saying "ditch Windows", they are saying "ditch IIS". IIS != Windows. There are other web servers out there that run perfectly well under Windows.
Really? Then why do these guys sell you discount passes for $3 less if you pay cash? Or is that a "credit surcharge", not a "cash discount"? :-P
FWIW, I went to one of their shows and I was able to get substantial discounts on computer goodies by paying cash instead of credit.
That's probably true for the US, and probably the rest of the Western countries. But most of the rest of the world relies only on cash, so you will still need cash if you want to travel to Eastern Europe or some of the other places where stores don't accept credit cards.
Yeah, but it later states that
AFAIK, the gold backing thing was mandated by the gold exchange standard of 1920's, which has been replaced in 1971 by the Smithsonian Agreement which established fixed exchange currencies and was itself replaced in 1973 with the so-called "fluctuating fiat currencies", i.e. exchange rates are set by the market according to supply/demand laws. So now currencies, including the US dollar, aren't really backed by anything except the strength of the economy of the country where they are issued. See this link for a documented study of the whole thing.
<LMAO> What if my country does not have a congress? You did say "geeks of the world". Or did you mean that I should write to someone in the American congress, even if I'm not an American? Now *that* would have some potential... :-)
Look, I wasn't trying to diss Debian. I run it myself on my laptop, and I quite enjoy the simplicity of apt. On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoy tinkering with the innards of my system and occasionally breaking stuff (that's how I learn best), and for that purpose rpm seems to me more powerful and versatile, but hey - to each his own.
That, and the fact that the average Apache admin is *way* more knowledgeable than your average IIS admin. I guess that's what you get when you market web servers under the "easy-to-use" paradigm: admins who know little else than where the "on/off" button is.
If you go here and search for any particular RPM, you can see what it needs before downloading it.
Even if they *did* work, what's the purpose? To keep tabs terrorists? Bwahaha. Bin Laden is already one step ahead in the high-tech race. He <gasp!> turned off his cellphone, ditched the e-mail account and he's now communicating through human messengers!.
Crypto backdoors... Carnivore... Echelon... what a load of absolute crap.
Here's a cheap one for you. And if I remember correctly from last time I was in a CompUSA store, 7.0 was even cheaper.
If you had lived in my country back then, it was not the microphones you would have had to fear. It didn't take the government too long to figure out that microphones were quite inefficient as a surveillance tool - it wasn't very practical to monitor 23 million people with microphones. They were instead relying on the people themselves to snitch on each other. And it worked flawlessly. We actually didn't have any surveillance equipment installed in our homes. However, we were perfectly aware of the fact that nobody could trust anybody. The conditioning was so perfect that I couldn't even trust my own mother back then.
Believe me, surveillance technology is a joke compared to what people can do to themselves...
OK, here's how it is, or rather, was: the police had every power imaginable, they could do pretty much anything to anybody without needing so much as a warrant. BUT they didn't abuse the power, because they were in turn terrified by the Political Police/Secret Service (think KGB). They did not engage in bribery/thievery because the money would have been useless to them. Everyone's income was set and strictly checked by the government and one could have ended up in jail for as much as $1 if one couldn't show proof of income for it. There was no way to launder money either, since banks, stores and everything else was state-owned.
As for the possibility of abuse, here's the trick: only theoretically the police could do anything to anyone, practically they only did what they were *told* to do by their superiors, who were in turn under direct orders from Party officials. And those guys enforced a very strict zero-tolerance policy. You probably wonder at this point why the guys at the very top didn't tolerate or encourage abuse on the part of the police. Simple: there was no need for it. The totalitarian regime was in its 4th decade of existence, and by that time pretty much everybody had already been brainwashed into total obedience, and those who resisted the brainwashing were long since "dissappeared".
To sum it up, everybody knew that as long as they didn't do what they were not supposed to do, they didn't have any problems with the police. They *did* fear the power of the police, however - the sheer fear of what the police could do to them kept everyone in line. At the same time, we knew we were completely safe from criminals, thiefs, serial killers, burglars etc., because there weren't any: the police took care of that as well. I hope that explains the safety/fear paradox you pointed out. Orwell illustrated it best in "1984", Communist regimes were full of such paradoxes.
As someone who has lived for 18 years in a totalitarian state, I have to disagree. It *was* the safest place on earth. Yes, you had to refrain from criticizing the government if you wanted to stay out of trouble, but you were physically safe in any other respect. Everybody was so terrified by the all-powerful police that crime was almost non-existent. Now I'm not saying it was the nicest place to live, but it *was* safe.
As a non-USian, I don't envy you guys. You'll probably end up giving up a lot of your rights (because that's what the scared-out-of-its-mind majority wants) for nothing. Contrary to popular belief, the Internet, and technology in general, are not somehow confined inside the borders of the US. Encrypted communication and all the other technological goodies will continue to exist outside of US no matter how much you legislate against them. Your laws will have no effect on what terrorists can or cannot do, they will only erode YOUR privacy. Welcome to the road to a nice and safe police state.
*sigh* you illustrate my point about emotional language perfectly. You see, what for you is "complete destruction of Israel" for Arabs is "regaining our homeland"; what you think is "preventing Iraq from using Kuwait's oil fields to gather the $$$ to build a nuclear capability" they see as "greedy Americans invading our country so that they can have cheap gas for their huge disgusting SUVs" and so on. This only leads to pointless hatred. THIS is how you ended up hating them for bringing death and destruction to your homeland, and this is how they ended up hating you for pretty much the same reason.
The way you want it, the US should probably just erase everyone in the Middle East who "hates the American way of life" from the face of the Earth (along with whoever gets in the way, innocent or not) and be done with it. That would all be fine and dandy, except for the devastating effect it would have on the US society itself. You've already witnessed the racial hatred ignited by the WTC disaster, with Arab-Americans being the targets of violence simply because they look Arabic. If you think people will accept the idea that "Arabs living in the Middle East are bad, but Arab-Americans are good" you're dead wrong. Declaring all-out war on Arabs, or even "some" Arabs is going to unleash a wave of racism in America like you've never seen before. Violence begets violence, people always seem to forget that...
I guess what my whole rant is about is that before being Arabs, Americans, Indians etc. we're all people. And the Arab civilians who have been killed by American bullets and bombs are no less innocent than the Americans who lost their lives in the WTC terrorist attack. If you ignore that, you'll become the victim of your own violence.